Yet there remains a vague purpose to his purposelessness, a low-simmering desire to recognize himself in his surroundings: "I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories."

The last time a cohort of young people expressed comparable frustration at the emptiness of their lives and the dispiriting purposelessness of their world was in the 1920s: it is not by chance that historians speak of a “lost generation.”

Priming the economic pump by giving unemployed Americans jobs, and incidentally creating some of the 20th century's great works of art, literature and architecture, was a way to stimulate the economy from the bottom up, and simultaneously quell that great demon of purposelessness that is the root of so much social instability in any society.

It is about a loss of connection with precisely the natural world that we are so relentlessly destroying; it is about a gnawing sense of purposelessness and aloneness that arises directly from our divorce from nature.